There are so many marketing professionals who have been around the block for many years who are still living in 1960. There are newly graduated, ambitious adults who are fresh out of University or College eager to implement their new found knowledge that is 50 years old. There are high school students who are going to enter the world of marketing through their post secondary education and what they are learning is 50 years old. I know because I went through the entire system and what I learned helps me if I lived in 1960, not anymore though.

This is the beginning of a new decade and while that means nothing it means a lot to me. 2010 marks 50 years since the beginning of the television complex started (roughly) and still 50 years later we’re still walking that path.

As creative marketers we need to get past using advertising and direct mail as our main strategies of promotion and focus on communicating powerfully by engaging the community, building movements, creating offerings worth talking about, getting involved in the conversations around your offering and getting online, all of this is what I call emotional marketing. The game has changed and too many of us have been left behind.

I refuse to accept that as reality. We’ll get there and when we do, the game will probably change again and we’ll need to keep moving ahead but first we need to understand that marketing is not a stagnant set of processes we follow. It’s a living, breathing, all encompassing creature that is the backbone to every successful business. Without it, we suffer, with it we prosper.